Thursday 15th February

And on a related matter………….

“A lot of academic related staff can’t see what the new union has done for them so far. What assurances can you give about what you would do to allay these fears?”

Dorothy – at UCL hustings today

A lot of different groups within UCU feel anxious about their position within the new union and I understand why. Academic related staff we a large minority of AUT membership and activists but are now a much smaller part of UCU. Moreover there has not been a clear enough means by which the voice of academic related staff can be heard.

This has happened at just the point that academic related staffs are having a hard time due to the framework agreement and are threatened with the erosion of the academic “team” and potentially in my view with privatisation of key functions if we let contractors get a foot in the door at language centres.

These concerns are compounded by the fact that NATFHE had only a few hundred academic related members, even though these did include some prominent and well respected members such as Wesley McCann, Vice Chair of the NATFHE Higher Education Committee.

It will be of little comfort that other groups also feel concerned. Groups such as adult education want, rightly, to be assured that their voice will be heard in the new union. So do land based and prison educators. Indeed, there are concerns across the whole of further education that they be treated as equal partners in the new union. Post 92 academic staff are anxious that their concerns will be dominated by pre-92 staff concerns. And I know that some ex-AUT members worry that they whole of UCU will be a NATFHE dominated union. I’d say the following:

1. We have to let these concerns be aired and ensure they are listened to. They are real concerns.

2. The first step to address the concerns is for everyone to acknowledge that UCU will be a multi-sector, multi-layered organisation. That means that we have to create structures, and ways of working that reflect that and enable each specific interest to be heard, enabled to operate effectively in such a way that the sum of the union is more than the addition of its individual parts.

3. NATFHE had such an effective structure and formally UCU has adopted it. It is unfortunate that in the Transitional Year it has taken some time to get those structures up and working and indeed they won’t fully function till after June 2007.

4. At the core of this structure is a right for each occupational/sectoral group to meet to determine its policy and develop its own goals and campaigns, working with others wherever possible but sometimes independently.

5. This arrangement will work. It was a similar structure to that which I helped lead in the health sector of MSF when I was head of health and we had well over a dozen different health professions each with their own “boutique” organisation and a common national committee where shared issues were discussed.

I am very very clear that such an organisation, with a substantial degree of delegated policy autonomy, as enshrined in UCU’s rules, is an essential precondition of making sure we can demonstrate to all such groups, including academic related staff, that we are serious about acting on their issues